Hi! I posted this on a different thread before realising that this one is much more recent:
I attended the Grey Coat Hospital until 2020, when my GCSEs were cancelled due to covid- I’m only 19 years old but perhaps my relatively fresh experience of the school may be useful (?!)
I’m going to be completely honest, I did not enjoy my time at that school at all. I’ve read the reviews written by students, some of whom were in my year group, and I do agree unfortunately. The strictness that the school is notorious for is actually abhorrent; in a school where so many students come from different areas of London and rely on public transport to get to school in the morning, making pupils miss half of their lunch break to do litter picking for being a few minutes late (often due to train/tube strikes) is ridiculous. I live in SE London (now at uni though) and I would often arrive a few minutes late due to issues with the trains, and would often get in trouble for this, despite it not being my fault! I found this exasperating.
The teachers are very biased and unhelpful and seemingly not trained well in dealing with more disruptive pupils at all, instead immediately resorting to putting the girls on report cards, which rather than inspiring you do behave better, just made you angrier that the teachers wouldn’t actually try to help you.
Detentions were the main form of punishment, and they would dish them out for EVERYTHING. You got no pre-warning if you, for example, forgot a reading book for English, it’s an automatic half an hour detention. The ways that really small problems would get extortionately blown up was incredible- the punishments were a bit prehistoric and entirely ineffective. In fact, I still remember my first week of year 11, when so many people got given a detention that they had to hold it in the canteen because there was no classroom big enough to fit that many girls!!
I also have my own opinions about sending young children to single sex schools for their secondary school education- I feel as though spending all of my teenage years with girls my age who were still figuring themselves out and growing into their personalities resulted in constant arguments for pretty much every girl at the school. Every teenage girl goes through a phase where they are- for lack of better words- quite bitchy (myself included!!), and it wasn’t uncommon to see people falling out with friends and being upset about coming into school because of friendship group drama.
I know a lot of mums disagree with this and think their daughters look sweet in their uniforms, but let’s be honest. They are ugly. And I know it’s probably a good thing that they don’t allow make up, but when you’re a 15-16 year old girl with acne that you can’t cover up, it does make you feel awfully self conscious. I was constantly being handed make up wipes and told to wipe off my concealer (I know this is my own fault for breaking the rules but it’s not uncommon to have confidence issues as a teenager!!) This isn’t helped by the monstrous patterned blouses and skirts triple the length of most toddlers.
The one person I cannot fault is Miss Young- she truly is one of the best women I’ve ever met and I still have nothing but the utmost respect for her. She is strict, but never harsh, and brilliant fun as well.
I ended up moving schools in sixth form, which I’d always planned on doing- I was lucky enough to go to a private school much closer to where I lived. It was a mixed school with a far different ethos, far less strict rules, and a far bigger focus on academia and the future. Seeing how the teachers had already embedded the importance of working hard into students that had been there since long before I joined was something I found inspiring, and pushed me to work harder myself, landing me in a great uni. I absolutely loved it; I almost didn’t understand how the extreme strictness that GCH demonstrates can make a child not want to work hard, as if to push back at the teachers and say ‘why should I try when you’re just mean to me?’ When you’re 11 years old, the future seems very daunting, and the last thing you need is teachers like the ones at GCH treating their pupils so unkindly.
I’d love to list some redeeming qualities, but unfortunately there is none! I really did dislike my time at GCH.
